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Sunday, October 17, 2010

If you want readers to find your self-published work, you need to know about Metadata. To help, I’m linking to a very informative post called “A Self-Publisher’s Guide to Metadata for Books.” Wondering what metadata is? It’s keywords that drive searches. When someone is searching for your book, say on Google, they enter phrases or words. It could be your name or book title, but it could also be something like “sci-fi historical romance.” If you know your audience, you can determine what your meta tagwords are. [Be sure to come back this Thursday when Alex J. Cavanaugh will be here to talk about knowing your audience.]

Carla King, the author of this article, takes you through providing the metadata for your book. She covers these topics:
Identifying Your Keywords
Provide Metadata for Your Book on Bowker
Metadata in Documents and Other Media
Metadata on Reseller Sites
Metadata on Social Media Sites
The Future of Metadata

It’s a very interesting article – worth reading and saving for future reference. Using metadata points readers to your book.

How many of you use metadata? Did you know you can create metadata for your Facebook “like” page? Did you know when you upload your book in Kindle format to Amazon, you have an opportunity to create metadata that point to your book?

I use Calibre on my computer to keep up with all my books and it uses Metabata to pull information in when I type in the name of a book. It fills in all the blanks and even gives a brief synopsis of the book to go with it. In addition, it can pull in the book cover.

Angel Sometimes by Helen Ginger

Angel Sometimes

Helen Ginger

Helen is the author of five books: three non-fiction, a short story anthology and a contemporary fiction, Angel Sometimes. She maintains an informational and interactive blog for writers and a weekly e-newsletter that has been going out to subscribers around the globe for thirteen years. She is an owner-partner and Women’s Marketing Director for Legends In Our Own Minds®, which specializes in creative networking opportunities for companies and groups.